Those of you with 3M or N-Trig hardware can now expect an out-of-the-box
touch experience that "just works" on Maverick, please file bugs if it
doesn't. A first cut of multi-touch support for Ubuntu has landed,
including drivers for a range of hardware, a gesture processing system
which does the heavy lifting of gesture analysis, APIs for developers
who want to build gestures into their apps, and support for
gesture-based window management in Unity.

The uTouch gesture framework includes several different components:

* libutouch-geis - ("Gesture Engine Interface and Support") which
provides a consistent platform independent interface for any system-wide
input gesture recognition mechanism for toolkits and applications
* libutouch-grail - ("Gesture Recognition And Instantiation Library")
which handles the raw data processing and provides higher-level gesture
abstractions for developers to consume
* gesturetest - which helps show the streams of events and data,
useful for debugging and planning

The utouch metapackage will pull in everything you need. It will be
installed by default on UNE ("apt-get install ubuntu-netbook" for the
full experience on your desktop, or "apt-get install utouch" for the
touch-related pieces only). It should be available shortly.

A big "thank-you!" to the crack team of engineers working on this
at/with Canonical:

We set up a PPA so that you can work with the latest and greatest. You
can start using what's there by entering the following in your terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:utouch-team/utouch
sudo apt-get update

There are a number of touch-related applications and frameworks that are
under active development. They are beginning to aggregate on Launchpad
under the HCI project group - if you'd would like to contribute new
multi-touch-aware software, consider doing it as part of that project
group to share resources such as lists, news, translation teams and so
on with other folks interested in the same field: